There are moments when tragedy descends into farce, then spirals further down into even deeper tragedy. The pandemonium that has erupted over a Chinese balloon drifting slowly across the middle of the United States must count as one of them. In prompting the suspension of US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken’s visit to Beijing – the first such high-level visit to China in five years – a week of much-needed fence-mending has been wrecked. It was replaced by an outpouring of outrage as Republicans vie with Democrats to show who can be the most hawkish on China. There was an eerie prescience in an article on Saturday by Bates Gill and Evan Medeiros: “Without this progress [of Blinken’s visit], the relationship will veer into unbridled competition that raises the risk of accidents and even intentional conflict.” In sum, it amounts to a diplomatic catastrophe for China, whether the balloon was spying over nuclear sites in Montana or it had been pushed off course by inclement jet-stream winds up in the stratosphere. It is an absolute gift to the narrative of US hawks who depict China as an aggressively expansionist would-be superpower bent on forcing the US into war – probably over Taiwan – within the next two or three years. We will probably never know whether it was a deliberate act of espionage gone wrong or a complete cock-up, but that hardly matters. History is littered with cock-ups with terrible consequences, right back to the 1914 assassination of Austria-Hungary’s Archduke Franz Ferdinand, which is credited with triggering World War I. Remember the Hainan Island incident in April 2001, when a US spy plane collided with a Chinese fighter jet just off the Chinese coast, forcing it to make an impromptu landing on a Hainanese air strip? Beijing’s leaders milked this US embarrassment for all it was worth, and it cannot be a surprise if Washington milks this Chinese embarrassment similarly ruthlessly. No matter that the balloon is not a threat to US security and could not give China better intelligence than it has already culled from satellites and other spyware, even if it was deliberately deployed to pass over a clutch of US military sites. This incident will forever form part of the hawkish narrative around China. For Washington, the timing could hardly be better, capturing the moral high ground exactly when US President Joe Biden needs it. I am sure he is already redrafting his State of the Union address to deflect Republicans who were poised to attack Blinken’s planned Beijing visit as evidence of the White House going soft on China. Would a Cold War-style agreement help prevent China-US tensions from escalating? For the US military and defence industries, the timing is similarly fortunate. With the US Treasury under budgetary pressure as the government bumps up against spending limits , there is rising anxiety in the Pentagon about spending cuts for what is already by far the government’s largest spending line item. Additional funding provided to support Ukraine’s fight against Russia has put pressure on the defence budget, and the threat from a rising China will doubtless spur calls for more funds. The more consensual the view that China is a nefarious actor with unscrupulous expansionist aspirations, the better. China’s leaders have been pushed onto the back foot by US initiatives – both military and economic – that are intended to clip China’s wings, with some saying it is preparing for war with China. The US has recently sealed military understandings with Japan, Australia, India and South Korea. Only last week, Secretary of Defence Lloyd Austin reached an agreement with Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jnr to give the US access to four military sites close to Taiwan and to Chinese military installations in the South China Sea. The US has tightened the screws in its tech war against China. It has secured agreements with South Korea , Japan and the Netherlands , helping it prevent Chinese tech leaders such as Huawei from getting their hands on state-of-the-art semiconductors or the machines that make them. A week ago, the Office of the US Trade Representative published its annual Notorious Markets List that portrayed China as a unique threat to protection of intellectual property. Some in Washington are threatening to challenge China’s “most favoured nation” trading status, which in normal times would be sacrosanct for any country that is a member of the World Trade Organization. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Chinese response has been to double down on efforts to become more self-reliant in a range of critical sectors and technologies. Last week, President Xi Jinping told a Politburo study group , “We must quicken the pace of tech self-reliance to prevent being strangled by foreign countries.” This counterproductive shift in the direction of “decoupling” might be music to Washington’s ears, but it will alarm trading partners across the world for whom China is an important trading partner and export market. There were hopes the now-postponed Blinken visit to Beijing might enable the start of a better-tempered discussion that could haul China and the US back from a tragic and unnecessary conflict that has awful consequences for communities, wherever we live in the world. It would be doubly tragic if the farce of a stray surveillance balloon over Montana prevented this. The sooner the two sides resume talking to each other, the better. David Dodwell is CEO of the trade policy and international relations consultancy Strategic Access, focused on developments and challenges facing the Asia-Pacific over the past four decades